Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social comparison and motivation to compete account for elevated risk-taking in fund management corroborated by asset market experiments when performance depends on rank-based incentives. Design/methodology/approach: In two laboratory...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to review behavioral explanations of the empirical observation that investment managers in mutual fund companies increase their risk taking when offered incentives based on how their performance is ranked compared to peers. Design/methodology/approach: A...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how trust in the sender of financial information and a narrative vs fact-related format of the information influence intentions to save in a mutual fund. Design/methodology/approach – In Experiment 1, 186 undergraduates participate and in...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a narrative compared to a traditional fact-related format of financial information elicits more involved processing of such information by consumers and therefore more informed choices of retirement savings....

We argue that the cost to a family of holding a large block of shares in a company, or under-diversifying, is reflected in the diversification benefits that the family forfeits. These costs can be substantial. For example, given a constant relative risk aversion parameter of 2, the median cost...

Tournament incentives’ schemes have been criticized for inducing excessive risk-taking among financial market participants. In this paper we investigate how relative performance-based incentive schemes and status concerns for higher rank influence portfolio choice in laboratory experiments. We...

One potential reason for bubbles evolving prior to the financial crisis was excessive risk taking stemming from option-like incentive schemes in financial institutions. By running laboratory asset markets, we investigate the impact of option-like incentives on price formation and trading...